Can Google Crawl This Page?
-
I'm going to have to post the page in question which i'd rather not do but I have permission from the client to do so.
Question: A recruitment client of mine had their website build on a proprietary platform by a so-called recruitment specialist agency. Unfortunately the site is not performing well in the organic listings.
I believe the culprit is this page and others like it: http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0
Basically as soon as you deviate from the top level pages you land on pages that have database-query URLs like this one. My take on it is that Google cannot crawl these pages and is therefore having trouble picking up all of the job listings. I have taken some measures to combat this and obviously we have an xml sitemap in place but it seems the pages that Google finds via the XML feed are not performing because there is no obvious flow of 'link juice' to them.
There are a number of latest jobs listed on top level pages like this one: http://www.prospect-health.com/optometry-jobs and when they are picked up they perform Ok in the SERPs, which is the biggest clue to the problem outlined above.
The agency in question have an SEO department who dispute the problem and their proposed solution is to create more content and build more links (genius!).
Just looking for some clarification from you guys if you don't mind?
-
Hi shr109,
I've sent an email over so you have my address. Please let me know if it doesnt come through, we're recovering from a couple of email issues this end (infected web server in the same IP Subnet as our email server got us blacklisted), it might have ended up in spam!
Thanks,
-
Thanks Toby, good to get a second opinion on these things and some clarification.
The platform is the agency's own proprietary one but i don't know if it's based on an existing framework or completely bespoke. Having looked at some of the other sites they have build though, it seems other clients are experiencing similar indexing problems as they have all utilised a workaround of some sort.
I'll share the name of the agency with you by email if you want to do some digging but I don't think it's fair to name and shame them on here - [email protected]
-
I think your pretty much spot on. Google -can- crawl queries but they wont rank very well at all.
Your best bet will be to change: (just reading into this that looks like a 'get all jobs' query)
to just
http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs
There are loads of ways to remove the query string and keep the functionality, depending on the software powering the site, personally i'd fix up the search to POST data so that it keeps the url clean and add in the appropriate routes to create the path.
I have some experience of job search sites (having worked on a couple of the largest in the UK) and breaking URLS down something like this seems to work best. (depending on the data you have obviously)
<domain>/jobs/<location>/</location></domain>
You could also take a look at how other job sites structure their URLS, (monster.co.uk, targetjobs.co.uk, jobsite.co.uk etc)
Let me know if you need a hand and i'll see if i can be more specific. (you'll have to tell me what its running on though)
EDIT:: You should force lower-case on urls as well. Caps wont effect google but they arn't user friendly (miss types etc)
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can slow mobile page speed affect desktop search results?
I heard recently from an SEO friend that with Google's recent update, mobile page speed now affects desktop results. Our site is relatively slow on mobile, and I wanted to check! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | lauraballer1 -
Link to AMP VS AMP Google Cache VS Standard page?
Hi guys, During the link building strategy, which version should i prefer as a destination between: to the normal version (php page) to the Amp page of the Website to the Amp page of Google Cache The main doubt is between AMP of the website or standard Version. Does the canonical meta equals the situation or there is a better solution? Thank you so mutch!
Technical SEO | | Dante_Alighieri0 -
How long after disallowing Googlebot from crawling a domain until those pages drop out of their index?
We recently had Google crawl a version of the site we that we had thought we had disallowed already. We have corrected the issue of them crawling the site, but pages from that version are still appearing in the search results (the version we want them to not index and serve up is our .us domain which should have been blocked to them). My question is this: How long should I expect that domain (the .us we don't want to appear) to stay in their index after disallowing their bot? Is this a matter of days, weeks, or months?
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Hi, our site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am thinking of putting an article on my home page in the middle under where it says lifestyle news, and getting rid of the middle column and instead have the latest news there to try and get google to visit more. I would like to know if you think this would look messy and not user friendly and if you think if i did do it would it get google to visit the site more often. all day we are always adding articles but on the home page it only shows a few lines of the article so i am concerned that these few lines are not getting google interested in visiting our site more often. we were on page one with our site but now since the upgrade we are on page eight so we are trying to combat this The article would change each time we put a new article on the site. so the article could be on there for ten mins before a new one is there any thoughts on this would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
My blog page isn't ranking in Google
Hi, I noticed that my blog page on my site isn't in Google when i search for full URL link http://www.asggutter.com/blog/ instead i see page that isn't even working asggutter.com/sitemap.xml screen shot http://screencast.com/t/6OVFLwL8nTL How i can i fix that. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0 -
Why is Google only indexing 3 of 8 pages?
Hi everyone, I have a small 8 page website I launched about 6 months ago. For the life of me I can not figure out why google is only indexing 3 of the 8 pages. The pages are not duplicate content in any way. I have good internal linking structure. At this time I dont have many inbound links from others, that will come in time. Am I missing something here? Can someone give me a clue? Thanks Tim Site: www.jparizonaweddingvideos.com
Technical SEO | | fasctimseo0